The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) is a deepwater

port A port is a maritime facility comprising one or more wharves or loading areas, where ships load and discharge cargo and passengers. Although usually situated on a sea coast or estuary, ports can also be found far inland, such as H ...

in the

Gulf of Mexico The Gulf of Mexico ( es, Golfo de México) is an ocean basin and a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean, largely surrounded by the North American continent. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United ...

29 kilometers (18 nautical miles) off the coast of

Louisiana Louisiana , group=pronunciation (French: ''La Louisiane'') is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It is the 20th-smallest by area and the 25th most populous of the 50 U.S. states. Louisiana is borde ...

near the town of Port Fourchon. LOOP provides tanker offloading and temporary storage services for crude oil transported on some of the largest tankers in the world. Most tankers offloading at LOOP are too large for

U.S. The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

inland ports. LOOP handles 13 percent of the nation's foreign oil, about a day, and connects by pipeline to 50 percent of the U.S. refining capability.

Description

Tankers offload at LOOP by pumping crude oil through hoses connected to a Single Buoy Mooring (SBM) base. Three SPMs are located 8,000 feet (2.4 km) from the Marine Terminal. The SPMs are designed to handle ships up to 700,000 deadweight tons (635,000 metric

tonne The tonne ( or ; symbol: t) is a unit of mass equal to 1000 kilograms. It is a non-SI unit accepted for use with SI. It is also referred to as a metric ton to distinguish it from the non-metric units of the short ton ( United State ...

s). The crude oil then moves to the Marine Terminal via a 56-inch (1.4 m) diameter submarine pipeline. The Marine Terminal consists of a control platform and a pumping platform. The control platform is equipped with a

helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attributes ...

pad, living quarters, control room, vessel traffic control station, offices and life support equipment. The pumping platform contains four 7,000- hp (5 MW) pumps, power generators, metering and

laboratory A laboratory (; ; colloquially lab) is a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific or technological research, experiments, and measurement may be performed. Laboratory services are provided in a variety of settings: physic ...

facilities. Crude oil is only handled on the pumping platform where it is measured, sampled, and boosted to shore via a 48-inch (1.2 m) diameter pipeline. The distance to shore puts LOOP outside U.S.

territorial waters The term territorial waters is sometimes used informally to refer to any area of water over which a sovereign state has jurisdiction, including internal waters, the territorial sea, the contiguous zone, the exclusive economic zone, and potent ...

, and special agreements in international sea law are made to allow ships from other countries to come under U.S.

jurisdiction Jurisdiction (from Latin 'law' + 'declaration') is the legal term for the legal authority granted to a legal entity to enact justice. In federations like the United States, areas of jurisdiction apply to local, state, and federal levels. Jur ...

to visit LOOP.

Onshore

LOOP's onshore facilities, Fourchon Booster Station and Clovelly Dome Storage Terminal, are located just on-shore in Fourchon and 25 miles (40.2 km) inland near Galliano, Louisiana. The Fourchon Booster Station has four 6,000-hp (4.5 MW) pumps which increase the pressure and crude oil flow en route to the Clovelly Dome Storage Terminal.

Storage

The Clovelly Dome Storage Terminal is used to store crude oil in underground

salt dome A salt dome is a type of structural dome formed when salt (or other evaporite minerals) intrudes into overlying rocks in a process known as diapirism. Salt domes can have unique surface and subsurface structures, and they can be discovered usin ...

s before it is shipped to the various refineries. The terminal consists of eight caverns with a total capacity of , a pump station with four 6,000-hp pumps, meters to measure the crude oil receipts and deliveries, and a Brine Storage Reservoir. The brine reservoir is supersaturated with salts so as to prevent further degradation of the massive

in which the eight caverns store the crude. This is because the supersaturated brine is much more dense than the crude oil, and as it is pumped into the caverns to push the crude to the surface and into the surface distribution systems. This results in virtually no loss of quality to the crude oil offload.

References

External links

LOOP LLC. - Home Page

LOOP Photos
Photos of the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port and an unloading ship, April 2002. {{Coord, 28.8852, -90.02508, type:landmark, display=title Ports and harbors of Louisiana Petroleum industry in the Gulf of Mexico Oil terminals Petroleum infrastructure in the United States Energy infrastructure in Louisiana

Description

Onshore

Storage

References

Further reading

External links